"This suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion, one of the scientists says. A meeting with the Bishop of Buckingham, who reads the Bible using his Apple iPad, appeared to back up this assertion.

"He pointed out how the Apple store in, for example, Covent Garden has a lot of religious imagery built into it, with its stone floors, abundance of arches, and little altars (on which the products are displayed)."

This must make Ellen Feiss – remember her? – the equivalent of Mary Magdalene or something.

"The Prediction API provides pattern-matching and machine learning capabilities. Given a set of data examples to train against, you can create applications that can perform the following tasks:o Given a user's past viewing habits, predict what other movies or products a user might like.o Categorize emails as spam or non-spam.o Analyze posted comments about your product to determine whether they have a positive or negative tone.o Guess how much a user might spend on a given day, given his spending history."

"Tablets using Google's Android platform could overtake Apple Inc's red-hot iPad within three years as improved versions and more applications hit the market, the head of chip designer Nvidia said.

"Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang told the Reuters Technology Summit in New York on Monday that tablets using new versions of Android, including Honeycomb, would outsell iPads as developers create more games and other software to use on them.

"The Android phone took only two and a half years to achieve the momentum that we're talking about. I would expect the same thing on Honeycomb tablets,' said Huang."

Better than the Motorola Xoom. Why? Because corporations love them. Why? Because they don't store anything – all your data sits on your BlackBerry, but gets presented on a bigger screen. Break the Bluetooth link, and nothing is left on the PlayBook.

"Internet users tap Facebook Inc's "Like" and Twitter Inc's "Tweet" buttons to share content with friends. But these tools also let their makers collect data about the websites people are visiting.

"These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal."

"Apple smartphones and those running on Google's Android system look set to come under tighter regulation in Europe, after an EU data protection advisory panel ruled on Wednesday that location information collected by the devices should be classed as personal data.

"This is likely to mean strict limits on how location data can be collected and stored by smartphone companies, telecoms operators and any businesses hoping to run location-related services on phones."

Apple is putting its support staff in an invidious position where they "can't confirm or deny" whether any such software (as the Mac Defender scareware) has been installed. And they don't get support to remove it.

Then again, it's listed as an "investigation in progress", so let's hope the support team's scripts improve radically, and soon.